The genealogical ramblings of Brandt Gibson as he researches his family history.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Genes Day Friday - A MAJOR and I mean MAJOR breakthrough!

When my great-great-grandmother Mary Sitzman emigrated from Europe, she told
her daughters Mary and Rose to stop speaking German and learn English, and to
say nothing about the old country. They were basically told to forget
everything about where they had come from and never speak of it to anyone.
Mary's blackout was so effective that my grandmother was literally told nothing
of her mother and grandmother's old homeland. It was as if everything on the
chalkboard was erased, the teacher was fired, and the school was closed.

Until this week.

I received an email this week from one of the matches to my grandmother's autosomal
DNA test. This cousin said he had ancestry from Rosshaupt, the same tiny German
village, now located in the Czech Republic, where Mary and her daughters hailed
from. I told him what little I knew - that Mary and her siblings Barbara, Rose,
Franz, Sebastian, and Josef had emigrated in waves from 1883 to 1906, that her
marriage and death certificates said her parents' names were John Sitzman and
Theresa Doffler, and that (according to the immigration records I'd found), the
surname was originally spelled Zitzmann.
Using those few details, this cousin looked into the church records posted
on http://actapublica.eu, a site which has
the church records of many cities surrounding and including Rosshaupt. I have
never seen this site before (probably because it's all written in German and
Czech, neither of which I know). He quickly found the marriage record for Johan
Zitzmann and Theresia Doerfler in 1865, which is just about the time when their
oldest known daughter Barbara was born! Not only that, he also found mention of
Josef Zitzmann in a book written by an old resident of Rosshaupt, giving the
house number he lived in, and stating that Josef had left for America in 1906,
the same year my Josef Zitzmann landed at Ellis Island! The match of
all these details in time and place seemed too exact to be coincidence - this
was my family!

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Marriage record for Johan Zitzmann and Theresia Dorfler

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This generous cousin has continued to comb through the online records, and
has turned up many more marriage and birth records, some apparently going back
to the late 1700s! Not only that, he's been giving me details of the political
and religious history of the area, and explaining the details of what exactly
is recorded in the records. After downloading a few of the records myself, I
asked for help from the German-Bohemian mailing list in transcribing them. A
very helpful professor has voluntarily gone searching for MORE records,
transcribing them, and translating them! All of this has brought many new
family names to light - Meyer, Daglmann, Herrmann, Seitz, and others. I can
hardly beleive all the information I'm being flooded with!

Back when I started researching my family history 12 years ago, I figured
that Mary Sitzman's line would be the one brick wall we'd never be able to
break through. How could we, when she committed all those who knew anything to
complete silence for their entire lives? However, through miracle of DNA
testing, the location of a few key records, and the assistance of some VERY
generous and helpful people, that brick wall has not only cracked, in many
places that wall is GONE. I'm sure I'll be stumped on a few people on the other
side of the wall (I still haven't yet found anything on Mary's husband and
father of her two girls yet, for example) but now I know that even seemingly
unsolvable mysteries can be solved.